


Oranges and Lemons

by Lassroyale



Category: Chuck (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Choices, Devotion, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Love, M/M, Mental Anguish, Mental Breakdown, Mental Disintegration, Mental Instability, Psychological Trauma, Sad, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-10
Updated: 2013-01-10
Packaged: 2017-11-25 01:19:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/633575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lassroyale/pseuds/Lassroyale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Intersect breaks him down.  It makes the familiar strange.  It makes him a reflection that he doesn't recognize in the mirror. </p><p>And as Casey watches, Chuck is becoming a stranger in his own life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oranges and Lemons

**Author's Note:**

> This deals with the idea I've had for awhile now, that the Intersect will eventually begin to degrade Chuck's mind. Please note that this setting is pretty much an alternate timeline or "what if" for Season 3, wherein Shaw is around but never goes rogue, and Chuck and Casey have been in a serious relationship for some time now. The season/setting is painted in broad strokes; the focus is really on Chuck and Casey's relationship and the tragedy that Chuck's unraveling mind brings.
> 
> Please note that there will be an eventual and major character death.

****

**Oranges and Lemons**

 

The Intersect will eventually smother all traces of who he is; Chuck realized that from the beginning. As time moves forward, he feels vital parts of himself slowly starting to become confused with things that he knows aren’t his own - thoughts, memories and feelings that belong to someone else, entirely. It makes him feel like he’s living inside of a borrowed body; there are days where he stares at his hands and doesn’t recognize the calluses he finds there.

The worst of it are the dreams.

Chuck dreams in loops and replays, information stuttering through his mind in vivid pictures smeared brightly behind his eyelids. He dreams in snatches of the familiar and wide expanses of the unknown. He dreams in flashes of memory that break and shatter, fragmenting through the empty spaces of his mind like chain-lightning across a barren wasteland. He dreams in darkness that sighs into the curve of his neck, whispering endearments and threats in the same breath; darkness that curls inside of him, touches him intimately, and steals every precious memory he has, piece by piece.

In his dreams, he runs. Always, he runs: Away, away, _away_.

And in his dreams Chuck wears his own skin like a stranger’s coat.

 

**-VVV-**

 

Wind sweeps along a country road that winds like a muddy brown river into the horizon. It looks like it has just rained; the air is thick with the aftertaste of a storm. Chuck is barefoot. His feet sink deeply into the muck, soft and cold between his toes.

He feels afraid; the fear crawls along his skin, hot and damp. He knows he's dreaming.

There‘s movement on the road behind him and Chuck looks up, knowing whom he’ll see. This is a new nightmare, though it somehow feels old; its breath drags across the back of his neck, balmy and stale. Chuck looks down the path and feels something knot within him, clenching like a fist in his throat. He begins to shake. He begins to run.

Casey is walking along the winding path with his head bowed. He is clothed in his military uniform. His shoes, usually pristine black, are splattered with mud and something else; something darker. It looks dull red beneath the sun.

Chuck nearly trips in his haste to put as much distance between himself and Casey as possible, his bare feet sinking down into the mud. Worms squish between his toes; the muck sucks at his ankles and slurps at his shins with wet, squelching noises.

Casey begins to chase him. Chuck tastes fear beneath his tongue. (Today, fear has the sweet tang of over-ripe oranges.) When Chuck starts to sink further, pulled deep down into the mud and earth, his panic rises.

Behind him, his voice looming ever closer, Casey begins chanting with a singsong cadence in a voice that doesn’t belong to him.

_“Oranges and lemons,  
Say the Bells of St. Clements.”_

Mud pulls at Chuck’s knees as he struggles to get farther away. Sweat beads on his brow. His body feels unusually heavy and Chuck strains to keep moving; it takes considerable effort to force one leg in front of the other. He twists and looks over his shoulder – Casey is gaining ground.

_“You owe me five farthings,  
Say the Bells of St. Martin’s.”_

Casey’s voice is dead and flat. His words travel on shards of broken glass, the edges of his syllables in turns jagged and smooth. The sound rakes down Chuck’s spine like claws dragged unevenly across a chalkboard, raising the hair on his arms. He struggles on, but by then he's sunk down so deeply, that the mud is already at his waist.

Chuck finches violently when Casey’s shadow stretches and falls over him with palpable heaviness, settling like a weight across his shoulders and pressing him down. The heaviness folds in on him, dense and suffocating, making the air thick and breathing difficult. He fights to draw air into his lungs, his chest too tight as panic careening towards the fore.

Chuck doesn’t recall Casey coming to stand in front of him, but when he looks up, he’s there. He suppresses a shudder of revulsion and chokes on the overwhelming taste of fear, sour in the back of his throat.

Casey stares down at Chuck with rheumy blue eyes, no evidence of a pupil behind the milky white film. His mouth is sewn shut with bright red thread. There’s a gaping hole where his heart should be, open and oozing with something Chuck can barely call blood. It’s too thick, too sludge-like…too black.

Casey squats down in front of him. His mouth cracks open, pulls the skin around his lips taut. The corners of his mouth crease and tear with a horrible ripping noise that makes Chuck feel queasy. The bile slams to a stop against the back of his teeth, but just barely.

_“When will you pay me?  
Say the Bells of St. Bailey’s”_

Chuck squeezes his eyes shut when Casey reaches out and rests a dry palm against the curve of his cheek. He leans towards him, his breath moist and hot, sharp with the spicy aftertaste of whiskey. The air hums with electricity, like a storm was gathering just beyond the slope of Casey’s shoulders. Chuck feels his skin prickle. He opens his eyes: Casey is staring at him with an expectant air.

Chuck’s tongue is thick in his mouth. His words are clumsy and rushed as he replies. “When I get rich, Say the Bells of Shoreditch.”

Casey’s face contorts; the edges of his mouth twitch painfully upwards. Skin rends further apart. It’s too gruesome for Chuck to consider it a smile.

_“When will that be?  
Say the Bells of Stepney.”_

Chuck flinches away when Casey places his other hand beneath his chin. His fingers spread over his jaw, dry like the rasp of sandpaper across his skin. Casey’s other thumb strokes along the line of his cheekbone, gentle and careful.

Chuck’s eyes blur with tears. “Casey, buddy, _please_ ,” he says. He knows this is a dream – knows it by the way his arms feel detached from his body when he reaches out and clutches the front of Casey’s shirt. He stares at the backs of his hands for a minute; they’re shaking. He doesn’t recognize them.

It’s all too real.

Chuck has a flash of a woman with brown hair and blue eyes, and perfect and dazzling smile. There’s a sense of comfort in her. A feeling of home is in the notes of her laugh. Chuck has no idea who she is.

“Please,” he says again, his voice pleading, small, and hopeless. 

Casey’s only reply is: _“When will that be? Say the Bells of Stepney.”_

His fingers close reflexively around Casey’s shirt when the other man leans even closer to brush his lips against Chuck’s brow. It’s tender. It’s like a benediction. He feels the air push in at him from all sides as Casey lifts him up and out of the mud; the muck grabs at his legs like the hands of a jealous lover. There is grime and dried flakes of mud caked beneath his toenails and in between his toes. . Otherwise, Chuck’s pants are inexplicably clean, as is the rest of him.

Casey pulls Chuck against him; he smells like something old and stale, like vacant space in an abandoned home. He wants to pull away as much as he wants to lose himself in the feel of him – of Casey.

“I do not know, Say the Great Bells of Bow.” Chuck chokes out the words on a hiccupping breath. He places a hand over the yawning hole in Casey’s chest, feels the too-black blood ooze over his fingers.

Chuck looks to his left; they are no longer on the muddy road. Instead, he’s in a room and he’s on his knees, without any explanation or recollection of how he got there. There is tile on the floor and the air is cool and damp. He shivers.

Casey is sitting on a metal folding chair in front of him. Chuck struggles to lift his head and look at him; it feels so heavy on his neck. He manages, catching a glimpse of him through the fringe of his lashes as the big man tilts forward and begins unstitching the red thread from his lips.

When it’s done, when Casey’s mouth is nothing but a torn red gash of shredded skin and bits of thread, Chuck watches in horror as the other man’s teeth begin to fall out. Casey tries to catch them, presses a hand to his mouth to hold them in, but he can’t and they fall to the floor in front of Chuck with a series of nauseating clatters.

Casey stands up and before Chuck can blink, before Chuck can even _register_ it, is poised behind him with a gun pressed against the back of his skull. Chuck closes his eyes and lets his shoulders slump. All at once, he’s just so tired, the fear and panic draining out of him as quickly and as forcefully as a riptide. He sags forward.

When Casey speaks, his voice spills out impossible and awful - a formless sound bleeding from ruined lips. Chuck, however, doesn’t need to hear the words; he knows them by heart.

_“Here comes the Candle to light you to Bed,  
Here comes the Chopper to Chop off your Head.”_

There’s a click as Casey thumbs off the safety. Chuck’s heart stops beating. Something flashes in the stale air before him: a memory, maybe, someone else’s or his – he doesn’t know, doesn’t know – of two men pressed close, hands on hips, fingers loosely tangled. Both are relaxed, almost slouching as they move languidly to music that Chuck can’t hear. There’s a snatch of laughter, the hint of a whispered word, and then the image fades, slipping away like a kite caught by the wind. Slipping away: just another thing – another memory - that Chuck can almost grasp but can’t seem to catch and hold onto.

A smile is on his lips and the snippet of a waltz is in his ears, when Casey pulls the trigger and paints the tile pulpy red with his blood and brain matter.

_“Chip chop chip chop – The Last Man is Dead.”_

 

  **-VVV-**

 

Chuck wakes thrashing, screaming, every inch of his body covered in a sheet of sweat. There’s a body on top of him, knees on either side of his hips, pinning him. Hands are on his shoulders, on his chest, in his hair, pushing him down into the bed; holding him still. A voice growls down from somewhere above him: Chuck doesn’t recognize it at first.

He fights harder.

“Goddamnit, snap out of it Bartowski!” He fights, he fights, he fights – he has to fight, has to hold on, has to – “Chuck, stop it, it’s _me_.”

The hands move to gather him close, and suddenly Chuck is being crushed against a broad, hard chest. The shirt against his face smells like detergent, clean and vaguely lemony. He inhales deeply, smells soap and something else beneath it all; recognition suddenly filters through his brain.

“Casey.” Chuck says the word in a rush of breath, clinging now instead of pushing away. The fight leaves him; his muscles relax as his terror begins to recede, curling away and leaving him feeling curiously empty. “Casey,” he says again. It's an affirmation, a consolation that the other man is real and solid against him. Chuck slumps and tiredly rests his head on Casey’s shoulder. He exhales a relieved sigh, comforted by the feel of Casey's arms folded warmly and securely around him.

Eventually, Chuck shifts and pulls back, drawing in a shaky breath. Casey looks at him and thumbs the deep bruises beneath Chuck’s eyes. His expression is grim in the darkness of the bedroom. “Your nightmares have been getting worse,” he states. His voice is deep and tight with layers of concern. It sounds nothing like dream Casey’s voice, all lilting phrases and shapeless noise.

Chuck nods and manages a tight smile. Casey doesn’t return it; there’s something haunting the corners of his eyes and lurking in the tense set of his mouth. “It’ll be fine,” says Chuck as reassuringly as he can. His voice sounds braver than he feels, but he knows Casey isn’t fooled. He averts his eyes and gets up to go to the bathroom to avoid Casey’s probing stare; to avoid the unspoken in Casey’s rigid jaw: _It wasn’t fine._ He was getting worse and the Intersect was turning him into a diminished version of himself, something strung together by data code and nerve endings and a brain that is constantly misfiring.

 

**-VVV-**

 

Chuck stares at himself in the bathroom mirror. He leans heavily over the sink; the faucet runs cold water over his hands as he absently rubs them together. He splashes some water on his face and blinks at his reflection. His drops his arms to his sides and clenches his hands into fists, trying to squelch the sudden panic threatening to rear up and overtake him.  

For a moment, he doesn’t know who’s staring back at him.  His digs his nails hard into his palms. 

It passes quickly: Chuck blinks again and he’s looking at his same old self, albeit with shadows both in and under his eyes.

It passes quickly, but it’s enough to tell him how very not okay he is.

Chuck lurches to the toilet and barely manages to flip up the seat before he’s vomiting into the bowl – his stomach is empty and he hasn’t eaten properly for a few days now. The bile burns his throat as tears sting hot behind his eyes.

 

**-VVV-**

 

Casey watches Chuck move like a wraith towards the bathroom, immediately noticing his missing warmth as soon as it’s gone. He curls his lip against the sourness in his stomach when he notes that Chuck looks skinny, like he’s lost just a little too much weight. The idiot hadn’t been eating right for quite some time now – he’d all but stopped eating in the last week or so.

 _‘It’s probably the nightmares,’_ Casey thinks, and scrubs his hands over his face wearily. Every night for the last few weeks it had been the same: Chuck would go to bed curled against Casey’s side and wake up screaming, terrified out of his mind. But it wasn’t necessarily the thrashing or the screaming that Casey couldn’t handle. No, it was lack of recognition, the way Chuck would sometimes wake up and look at him as if he were a stranger.

It made him sick to think that Chuck might wake up one day and have no idea who Casey was, or worse, that he would have no idea who _he_ was.

Casey sees the lack of recognition in Chuck’s eyes sometimes, sees how he looks at everyday things like maybe he’s forgotten what they are. He sees him look at Morgan the same way, hell, he sees him look at _Ellie_ the same way. It wouldn’t be long until Chuck was a stranger in his own life.

Casey reaches behind the headboard to the gun he keeps there. He thumbs the safety, clicks it off and then back on.

The kill order came in a week ago. Chuck’s a liability: All of that precious information stuck inside a degenerating mind. Casey _does_ want to kill something, but that something is not Chuck. He’s given him time, yanked him from work and forced him to have an extended vacation. He’s moved him in with him, living the domestic life he’s always been denied and secretly craves. It should’ve been good.

It is anything but.

Casey places the gun back in its hiding spot when he hears Chuck throwing up in the bathroom.

It should've been great...

Turning, he goes to check on him.

(To be continued…)


End file.
